Caving Calamity
Caving Calamity is an original game made in Unity with the Fungus plugin, which was fully concepted, written, designed, and produced by myself, with artwork soon to be provided by an artist. The game is a single 30 minute experience wherein the player navigates a cave to find a stranger's belongings via point and click inspired gameplay and inventory management in order to exit the cave.
I started development by creating the design document where I planned the design pillars which are:
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Exploration - Traversing the cave
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Point & Click
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Resource Management - limited food items and hunger statistic to manage
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Horror - creepy atmosphere and mysterious character
I then went on to plan the narrative. Since Fungus is a visual novel plugin, it made sense to utilise it for telling the narrative of the game, which in turn would generate player motivation as well as provide clues to other endings of the game.
Lastly, I concepted what the mechanics of the game would be which are the following
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Inventory system - store food
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Hunger system - hunger decreases when traveling between rooms, hunger can be replenished
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Navigation - How to move from room to room
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Search - check rooms for any items such as food or story related
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Map - Show a map of the cave
With the design document complete, I then went on to create the mechanics in engine. For navigation from room to room and searching in rooms, I used Fungus's choice menus to present the player with choices on what to do inside of a room eg go left, go forward, SEARCH. In the full level of the game, I would assign values to each room by hand, so I would assign to a room either a key item, rats, or nothing.
Next I created the Hunger system. Essentially what happens is when the player enters a room, Hunger is decreased by 1.
I then created an inventory to store food. When food is eaten, the Food variable decreases by 1 and Hunger is increased by 5.
I then created a variable for rats, wich are found via room searches, and make a noise when they are present in a room. Searching the room instantly adds the Rat to the inventory and eating one increases Hunger by 3. Another variable for IsSearched is made true to prevent the player from being able to research the room and collect more rats.
Lastly, I programmed Key Item Inventory. When the player finds a key item, the variable is increased by 1. When the player has all the key items, they can return to the start to initiate the main ending of the game. Depending on the player's choices, they will get either a good or a bad ending. Specifically, the player is able to inspect the key items to find out clues to get a good ending. There's also an entire option to not initiate the main quest of the game if the player refuses to accept the stranger's quest. And finally, there is a secret ending to the game where the player is able to find a pickaxe and a hollow wall in 2 rooms of the cave and break through the wall to escape.
With all of the mechanics now made, I had to produce a level for the game.
I started by making a map, marking the various rooms with black circles, the paths between rooms, and key items. I then fully recreated this map in Fungus, replicating the layout of the cave almost 1 for 1 so that I could assign items and plot hunger perfectly.
Then with some efficient play testing, I found the perfect rooms to place Rats so that the player is able to navigate to and from every room of the level once, with some leeway for getting lost / confused, without resulting in a game over.
Map I drew to show the branching paths. Player uses this map in game to keep their bearings.
The complete flow diagram of the finished game, ordered identically to the map image
Map I drew to show the branching paths. Player uses this map in game to keep their bearings.
I then went and placed the pickaxe and hollow wall into the level at opposite ends of the map, so that if the player went for this ending, it would be quite a challenge, and not super easy to stumble upon.
I then fully implemented the introduction and ending sequences to the game. This included branching narratives so that the user the feeling of choice towards their character's dialogue, and endings based on what they did in their gameplay (searched for key items, inspected them, escaped with pickaxe).
With the game being fully complete-able, I then produced some art direction for an artist to create artwork for the characters of the game (Stranger, Player, and Davies).
While working on this project, I used a taskboard to breakdown the game into smaller completion goals that would form the complete experience. This allowed me to keep track of what I had done in each sector of the game and what I was yet to do in order to complete it.
